Traffic Wales, the unique partnership between the Welsh Assembly Government and engineering consultants Atkins has been making an impact on ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) internationally, since the inception of a working partnership with the Michigan Department of Transport and the Swansea University Institute of Advanced Telecommunications, which began at the start of 2006.
This work is being carried out cooperatively with a MDOT (Michigan Department of Transport) programme which aims to collect information from individual vehicles and an aggregate of vehicles as a whole. Information such as average vehicle speeds, weather information (outside temperature and windshield wiper activation) and safety system performance can then be communicated to the roadside management systems and used to make improvements to the network and to individual driver safety. These types of activities are known as Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) and are likely to be commonplace on our road networks in the future.
The development of VII in Swansea is promoted by a research project in conjunction with Motorola and a number of other private sector partners entitled IRIS (Intelligent Radio-Fibre Telematics Scout). This primary aim of this project is to look at ways how enhanced services can be delivered to motorists, providing them with in-car traffic information terminals or bespoke systems. This has the objectives of developing:
- A high-speed wireless system that can interface with a fibre-optical backbone
- Protocols capable of sharing the network within designated areas and handing over to neighbouring areas without breaking the connection
- An in-car wireless network with appropriate multimedia interfaces
- Ways of predicting road traffic, based on the real-time data and then integrating these in the hardware with appropriate multimedia interfaces.
Other partners involved in this project, find ways of using the systems and data to ease traffic congestion, prevent or reduce the impact of some crashes, monitor traffic conditions, and computerise traffic control and traveller information systems.
The relationship between Swansea IAT and Traffic Wales has developed further through the WISDOM project, which supports ITS developments in Michigan through Motorola. The WISDOM project focuses on the development of a new form of storage network that can be used to manage an entire city.
This distributed, self-contained storage is resilient in disaster scenarios and grows with the network size and the needs of its users by using a wireless mesh infrastructure. Specific software tools will also be developed for indexing, archiving and interrogating data over variable geographical locations. This can potentially be used for stolen vehicle tracking, parking space location searching, minimal congestion route identification and general searching of multimedia content.
Technology developments in ITS are a key consideration in the Welsh Assembly Government’s automotive strategy, which aims to attract new companies to set up in Wales. This new industry has clear employment benefits and also enables organisations working in the field of ITS and private investors in Wales to use Michigan as a foothold into the American marketplace. In the same way, American investors may gain a foothold through Wales into the European market, giving Wales a competitive advantage in today’s highly competitive international marketplace.
